


Blessed be the ones who let us change

by bluebloodbruise



Category: Good Omens (TV), Good Omens - Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, Friends to Lovers, Hurt/Comfort, Love Confessions, M/M, Mutual Pining, POV Crowley (Good Omens), Slow Burn, So much talking, Talking, Trauma, some sex and horror undertones, the E rating is for "explicit displays of love"
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-08-06
Updated: 2019-09-04
Packaged: 2020-07-29 14:27:27
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 6
Words: 18,749
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20083711
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bluebloodbruise/pseuds/bluebloodbruise
Summary: "Always the one demanding, nothing prepared Crowley for offerings. Reciprocation scares him. God had never loved him back, and She made him; how could he expect an angel to want him without falling?It is a terrible thing to be loved when you've never learnt to love yourself."Love drives Crowley to change. Arizaphale struggles to keep him safe.(on hiatus till late 2020)





	1. Hydrogen (H2)

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Rend_Herring](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Rend_Herring/gifts).
**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Here's a story of hurting and healing I didn't think I'd write. For Rend_Herring. I'm glad we are bound by this.

“Did you know you scream in your sleep?”

The demon rubs his eyes. Many questions spring to mind as he regards the angel standing by his bedroom window, a white cutout against the night sky. 

Reaching for his sunglasses, the demon picks one question he isn’t afraid of having answered.

“Since when you notice?”

In the darkness, the angel tilts his head. 

“Since I was inside you, I believe.”

The wording is not what not gets him; it’s the implication of how long he’s been left vulnerable, broadcasting weakness when he believed to be sheltered in sleep.

He lets himself fall back to the mattress. He is awake but his nightmares are in the room.

“So a year, give or take?”

A demon can tell when silence is fraught with secrets. He created those silences for lovers and penitents who fear not to be granted forgiveness. 

“Give or take,” the angel rustles across the room. If he didn’t know better, the demon would swear he could hear the angel lock his hands in front of his chest, as if closing the conversation off.

The demon sighs, scrubbing a hand down his face. 

(List of observations, ranked according to gravity: 

1\. He needs a shave. 

2\. Sunglasses can only go so far in keeping you from what you don’t want to see or show. 

3\. The ashen sheets smell of powdered gold and icing sugar, which means at some point in the night the angel had been close enough to touch.)

The demon pulls the covers around his shoulders, covering bare skin. There shouldn’t be any shame left on a fallen angel, not about a body, not about lust and loneliness and longing and all the other L-shaped words he doesn’t care to capitalize. But maybe shame is the byproduct of being made known to those who have the power to reject you. 

_I love you,_ comes to him unbidden, lying naked in bed at 3am, an angel hovering, uninvited and unmovable, at the threshold of his bedroom. _I love you, you clueless, callous creature._

What he says aloud is, “So you just been listening to me hollering in my sleep for the last twelve months? All across the shops?”

The angel bristles and the demon sees it without needing to look at him. 

“I would send soothing prayers and comforting thoughts your way."

“That worked?,” the demon rises to his elbows, genuinely curious.

“It seemed to,” the angel concedes, tight-lipped. “More or less.”

“Until tonight?”

The silence stretches again, a pincushion littered with needles. 

“Your wings come out in your sleep,” the angel offers instead, apropos of nothing. Hushed and wondrous like a secret exchanged in sweaty locker-rooms and marooned rest-stops. A demon sees a share of those.

“Oh do they now?”, he sneers. “Took a proper gander, then?”

The angel stiffens and there it is, shame, volleyed over. The peroxide zing of righteous vindication dies fast and bright in the demon’s belly, immediately replaced by a bleached hollowness. 

_I love you,_ it paces again in the vestibule behind his heart. _Savagely. Why can’t you find me worthy?_

The angel steps back, receding farther into the darkness. Readying to take flight, what else. 

(Can’t blame him now, can we?)

Alone and too bare, the demon burrows deeper in his silken cushions.

“They are _exquisite_,” a little white bell echoes, and the demon can’t help squeezing his eyes shut because tinted glass can only go so far in shielding you from the mortifying ordeal of making yourself known.

“Don’t you dare,” he spits into the pillowcase. “Don’t you dare say that to me.”

When angels move, the air parts slightly, molecules dipping to accommodate their celestial weight. Before the edge of the mattress shifts, before earthly matter could be impacted, his body could tell, instinctively, that an angel was about to touch him. His muscles recoiled and his breath sped up, swiftly and hurtful, like an altitude drop. 

(That. That he should know how it feels.)

With both hands covering his face, the demon is suddenly incapable of breathing, a butterfly pinned to a slide, a specimen splayed on an autopsy table. 

The angel hesitates before circling his shin, pulling it from under the sheet, a thumb traveling up the seam of his leg, tracing the divot on a bare hip, sacrum, scapula, a star-stampeded trail of thunder across skin and bone, until his hand flexes open and flat between scarred shoulder-blades. 

The angel presses his thumb to the singed lines, pencilled in grey by burning asteroids. 

It hurts. It hurts with memory and it hurts with want. 

The demon, accustomed to unimaginable physical pain, schools himself not to scream. He reminds himself that intimacy should be earned and not freely given, that angels and demons taught him he should _never never_ let on when he feels weak with tenderness, cracked open with the need to be made human by someone’s kind and knowing touch. To be known, to be wanted. He has very little use for both, braced as he is between earth and hell. 

So he wills his body to stay still, to cease all motor functions until the angel grows tired and leaves. He sets his heart to that moment: the moment he will be left. Alone, but also unknown, unbothered in a refrigerated sort of peace.

“This hurts you, doesn’t it?” Prescient, an angel, of course. He doesn’t remove his hand though. If anything he leans in harder.

The demon flinches, tries to twist his body away. 

Lying comes naturally to fallen angels, and yet he finds himself hissing, “Yes.”

“Is it me? Do I hurt you?”

“Of course it’s you!,” he snaps angrier than anticipated. “You’re an angel! Every inch of you is consecrated ground!”

The angel pulls his hand away, tucks it neatly on his lap. 

“So were you.” He sounds so sad when he adds, “Once.”

“Yeah,” the demon sneers. “But that was a very long time ago.” 

They sit cautiously in silence until the angel clears his throat and makes to stand up. 

He doesn’t leave, however. He lingers by the foot of the bed and the demon can feel him, torn, unsure, parsing, after all these months and still a prisoner of fraying faith, a voluntary dweller in self-made purgatory. 

Sometimes, much less now, but still sometimes, the demon wishes the angel would let the world fall apart, just step aside and put them both out of their misery in one fell swoop.

The angel runs a hand over his three-piece suit, smoothing down invisible wrinkles. 

“May your dreams be sweet,” he finally whispers and the demon can see him—through fogged lenses and milky corneas—wringing his hands together.

Truth be told, he had always seen him, that flicker of arcane warmth, followed it through war and oceans and time. Through death and the afterlife too, if a demon will ever be granted such a thing, he would follow the angel there too, the one fixed point he had loved without reprieve or regret. 

And still, with all his foresight, _still_ the demon did not see it coming: the angel bowing down, one knee to the ground, and kissing his bare ankle. 

The pain is like nothing a demon ever experienced, a spinning wheel of miniature knives scrapping each nerve-ending raw, making skin seem textured and felted. He doesn’t move. He could taste the flesh steam and blister under the angel’s moist lips, and still he did not move. 

(How could something so delicate feel so infinitely violent?)

Eventually he did whimper, but by then it was too late. It was daylight out and he had lost time. Well, not just time but something else along the way. 

Shame, Crowley realized bolting upright in the empty bedroom. And fear too.

*

It was a long time ago, the first time he asked,

“Can demons love?” 

To which a minor clerical official answered, 

“What sort of question is that?” 

“Just voicing a passing thought, that’s all,” Crawly had muttered, ducking his head down. 

“Well don’t,” the voice ordered without looking away from a scrolling ledger. “You sound like a foolish angel.” 

“Well,” the demon thought but did not say. “I was one not that long ago.”

*

A good while after the earth drowned, Crowley asks again, 

“Are demons capable of goodness?”

To which a leading officer, a general in bureaucratic wizardry, replied,

“What sort of conversation is that, demon? You held the semblance of goodness once, but inside you were rotten from conception. Damnation is not your punishment, underling. It’s your reward.”

Eyes on his scaly feet, the demon turns to leave, but before he can reign in his thoughts, he is pressing,

“But what if I were to meet someone like myself, one who like myself has a face that does not completely mirror the inside? Would that be a favored match? Could I, perhaps, be made for them, if not for forgiveness?” 

“What nonsense is this, Satan’s child?,” the officer boomed. “Sin lives in pain and thrives in isolation. That’s what you are, what you hold. You are sin and you are pain, nothing less and nothing more. Now go and cut your damn hair off.”

“What’s the matter with my hair?”

“It makes you look—“ the bow-tied general winced.

“What?”

“Like a goddamn angel.”

* 

The demon stopped asking shortly after nails fastened men to crosses. He realized the answers wouldn’t change and he had run out of people to question anyway. 

He was now alone, completely alone, and for the first time he understood what falling truly entailed. Not to burn in a ring of fire, but to languish in the chill of loneliness for all eternity. No divine nor demonic creature would ever care to know him and no human ever could. 

No one would love him either, but by the fourteenth century it did not seem to matter. By then he was quite certain to be unlovable all the same.

*

The following night and the one after that, the angel is in the bedroom when the demon wakes up screaming. He is never there in the morning, but little traces are. A book, a white feather, a chewed-up apple core. 

The demon pretends not to notice, much like he pretends not to see every night the angel stands closer, dithers not by the door but by the windows, the planters, and then the closet, until one stormy night he is perched by the headboard so maddeningly within reach the demon throws his sunglasses, his sheets, and all his caution in the wind, and grabs the angel by a cuff, then an elbow, the front of his jacket, pulling him forward until he has toppled more or less of his own accord into the bed, onto his body, a demon’s body only vaguely shaped like a man’s but void of mankind’s goodness, or so Crowley thinks though what he says is, “Kiss me. For god’s sake, if you are going to break my heart at least kiss me first.”

The angel, a creature of obedience and love, seems unable to comply, his eyes wide and watery in the blue neon light streaming from the outside, from a city filled with ingenuity and vice and yet unaware of this particular brand of pain, of bravery, and although Crowley would be loathe to admit later, it was he who bridged the gap first, who kissed the angel first, rough and merciless, who felt the blood well up first too he imagines, because as soon as their open mouths touched blood vessels shattered all across the demon’s tongue and gums, a liquid tangy saltiness not unlike asteroid dust and ethyl acetate, and you would think that would stop them, you’d think a mouth filled with acid blood would tear an angel away from a demon, but as fate wanted it, it only made them want each other more, the angel growing heavy and insistent against the demon’s chest, between his legs, the cool grip of his manicured hands freezer-burning imprints on the demon’s naked shoulders, forearms, ribs, hips, all these black dots of singed skin that looked remarkably like a daisy chain, like Orion, like the spectra of hydrogen-burning stars. 

“I love you,” the demon stammered though a mouthful of blood. “I always did and always will.” 

It hurt to speak, not where skin had been eroded by divine spit, but in his heart. It hurt inside his human heart. 

The angel pulled back to catch his eye. Teeth streaked red, eyes bruised purple, he smiled. The Principality leaned in and kissed him again, gently this time, forehead, nose, cheek, a phosphorous sparkle of light igniting every time lips made a landfall on skin.

They thought of it at the same time, did it at the same time: lifted a hand and snapped their fingers, washing the blood away. 

After that, it was a blur, a vicious cycle. Hesitating, panting, tongues coming together, blood spurting, snapping their fingers again. Keeping their hands on fabric, guarded, grinding, skin away from skin, vacillating, opening their mouths, blood flowing, snapping their fingers again. Spitting blood on the pillow mumbling “fuck,” the angel’s crystalline chuckle pitched against the night “I am endeavoring to,” and both their laughs mingling, hands laced and pinned together on the mattress. “What if it kills us?” and it wasn’t a question as much as a challenge, so the angel brushed the hair off yellow eyes and whispered, “Then we die together what else,” kissing him with such brash confidence, the demon’s heart shook, a pendulum swing, stuttered, rushed, clutched and then, with no explanation whatsoever, bursted, much like a star would, from the inside out.

The demon’s nose and lungs filled up with blood so quickly his throat seized. Sensation vanished from his toes and arms. The lights went out of his brain. 

When he woke up, he was alone in bed, sheets immaculate and smelling of mint soap. The English sun was out and his mouth tasted like copper pennies. The angel was nowhere to be seen and his heart droned on, nothing amiss, nothing changed.

There was something, though, found upon closer inspection. A row of black smudges, like fingerprints, dusted around his wrist. A bracelet or a handcuff, shaped like an ouroboros. 

The demon regarded his naked form on the full-length mirror and decided, “I’m his now.”

* 

As a matter of fact, the angel had touched him once before, his hand instinctively bracing across the demon’s collarbone when they did get into a car crash. It made no difference whatsoever to the vehicle as to his clavicle, but the incandescent pain where skin met skin right in the hollow of his throat told the demon all he needed to know, all he already suspected: that even if demons could love, no angel would ever dare to return the sentiment. It burned to do so. It burned then, on the dark country road, and it did for years and years to come, long after the blisters disappeared.

Every night thereafter, in the stony vault of his temperature-controlled apartment, the demon touched himself and thought of the angel accidentally grazing his neck as metal and glass supernovaed all around them, leaving no mark on their earthly bodies but the black char of celestial fingertips searing off damned flesh. 

He thought of his once russet curls and of the look of utter irrational panic in the angel’s eyes when the demon had murmured, “Please forgive me,” right before his immortal body had been thrown through the imploding windshield.


	2. Nitrogen (N2)

They lie side by side on the park lawn, the canopy of trees making the night feel frosted, velveteen and endless. 

It’s been a week since his heart tore to pieces, and the mending is just a patch job, a damp bandaid that won’t hold. Crowley should know. He's put many up himself.

Tonight he sets that knowledge aside. He stretches, pillowing his head with his hands, and asks, because when in doubt make a fort out of questions, barricade yourself behind other people’s answers, 

“Do you remember how heaven smelled?”

The angel shrugs. “Not particularly. Do you?”

“I remember the smell of the cosmos, expanding.” He turns to look at the angel, at the white sheen of his profile, never quite sunk in darkness, not even in the wilderness, not even in the company of a demon. “Like molten glass, it smelled. Like welding sparks.”

“Do you miss it?”

It begins to drizzle. The demon lifts his hand and raindrops fan all around them, as if they were placed under a glass dome.

“I miss the absence of pain,” Crowley admits.

The rain thuds as it picks up speed, battering trees and bramble and the invisible shield the demon has put up with his mind. The angel tips his head sideways, his perfectly shaped hands perched over his stomach.

“What pain is that?”

The demon considers how to talk about something old that aches like something new. 

“A pain does not need to have a name to hurt,” he settles on.

“And to heal?”

The demon shrugs. “Giving it a name may _not_ help.”

“I imagine it can’t hurt either,” the angel chirps, preens, always so sure of easy fixes.

“Oh you would be surprised!,” the demon sneers. Meanly, too deliberately mean. 

“Don’t be snide,” the angel turns his face up and away, towards the vanishing stars. “It does not suit you.”

“I am a demon!,” Crowley balks, sitting upright on the wet grass, suddenly short of breath. It’s a hollow threat, but he misses him, he misses touching him, he misses the lover even though he tells himself to be contented with a guardian angel. He can’t help the want. Might be part of why he fell anyway. The constant wanting for more. 

Sighing, he lies back down. "You’d think pain would fit me like a glove.”

The angel pats his shoulder sympathetically. “Perhaps you can change your stripes, dear boy? Out with the old?”

And that pinches a bit too close to the bone, that wording coming from an immortal being who hasn’t so much as changed his pocket-watch in two centuries, let alone his beliefs. Like nitrogen, Aziraphale would never feed a flame.

Cruelty is not a choice Crowley ever favored, not when honesty is right there and often serves the same cutting purpose.

So, propped on his side, he holds his angel’s soft-water gaze and says, “How could I ever leave you?”

“What?”

“Aziraphale,” the demon exhales, a finger hovering over the angel’s inquisitive button nose, air-tracing his righteous pinched mouth. He knows the taste of that mouth now. Blood and all, but still. He knows. “A pain doesn’t need to have a name to hurt, but sometimes what hurts _is_ a name.”

“Oh,” the angel’s eyebrows steeple and his kind face crumbles as understanding dawns. “Oh! Oh dear! No, I didn’t mean to bring up fall—”

“I know you didn’t.”

“Really I—“

The demon lays on his back, vaults both hands over his chest. Like a pellegrina or a cuirass. Armor by any other name. 

“Say nothing of it.”

The angel hadn’t understood after all. Not the whole of it. That it did hurt to remember his first name, the one sewn in gold stitches across his tailbone, but that that was a dull pain compared with a name being all that he could ever keep of his beloved—that in the absence of his beloved’s lips, all he was given was a name, to caress, to hold between his teeth. That a name was all he would ever touch open with his tongue, at bedtime or in the daylight, and that it shouldn’t feel so sharp with longing that roosting of desire, but there he was, a demon, featherless, in his nameless want for an angel.

The rain stops abruptly and the clouds part to reveal a waning moon, perfectly halved. It seemed to hang disarmingly close, like an offering, right over the demon’s heart. He wondered if the angel had anything to do with it.

“Leaving things unsaid seems to be part of the problem,” the angel chides, surprisingly loud and put-upon, and yes, he absolutely had something to do with it.

Having reached his limit of compassion for one night, the demon stands up, careful not to offer a hand down. 

“Or perhaps things remain unspoken for a reason,” he says, pulling out his car keys.

The angel sits up but refuses to budge further. Cautious and stubborn, always. Too stubborn for a creature of goodness, some would say. Too cautious to ever fall. 

“The reason for silence should never be pain,” the angel rebuffs, huddling knees to chest, like a wounded animal. “Spared or otherwise.”

“Really? What’s a good reason to leave things unsaid then?”

“Why, love, of course.”

The demon wants to scoff at the angel’s childlike certainty, his blessed naiveté, but comes out empty. 

“Damned if I do, damned if I don’t huh?” He shakes loose grass off his black leather jacket, shakes a hand at the sky until clouds rumble again. “Are you sure you don’t work for my lot?”

The angel’s fingers unravel from his lap, curl tightly around the demon’s ankle, right above his black sock.

“Please,” the angel mutters to the ground. “Go to sleep.”

Immediately the demon finds a wave of drowsiness washing over him. He imagines he can’t fight it, and so, swooning quite inelegantly, he doesn’t.

*

He comes to in his bed, which is not surprising, the angel curled around him and tucked under his chin, which is surprising only as far as Crowley told himself not to expect any more kindness in this lifetime. And yet, there it is: a man-shaped kindness, nestled in his arms. 

He tells the crown of white curls, like an apology, or maybe just an explanation, “I am filled with anger.”

“No, dear,” the angel’s breath tickles his stubble. “You are filled with grief.”

“Isn’t that the same in the end?”

The angel’s head pops up, plump and pinked and serious. 

“Heavens no! Grief grows flowers. Anger grows weeds.”

“Flowers are temporary, while weeds are hardy,” the demon remarks.

“My point exactly, dearest.”

"Let it go, don’t hold on?”

“Something like that,” the angel perks up, beams as if he had just won a valuable argument. He plops his head back into the hollow of the demon’s throat.

The demon touches the angel’s hair, one awkward swipe across his skull. He finds he can’t quite help it. 

“Does that apply to you? Should I let go of you too, angel?”

The angel smiles, a petulant line pressed against the demon’s Adam’s apple.

“I would never be so foolish as to compare you to a flower, Crowley dear.”

“More of a weed uh?”

“If you were horticultural, then you would most certainly be a fruit tree.”

“Barren or poisonous?,” Crowley volleys with false levity because this is one of the answers he fears. 

The angel’s arms come around his shoulders, pulling their clothed chests together slowly. He seems so careful not to touch any patch of bare skin when he breathes into Crowley’s ear, 

“Self-contained and full of life. And yet, _ oh_ so very well-guarded.”

*

After standing over the kitchen sink eating old cheese and crackers, they linger at the front door: the angel on the outside, the demon inside of the threshold. It repeats a pattern they had enabled for quite some time.

Crowley wants to hold him close, rip his clothes off, beg him to stay. He knows he can’t. First and last, he tells himself, that other night, in his bed, with the blood between them. 

He looks at the angel in his hallway, head bowed and eyes shuttered, teasing the rumpled hem of his summer coat. The simple presence of him a minor miracle, the smell of him muddled with anxiety, tart with fear. This is what they have now and it’s quite a lot. Should be quite enough. 

It’s not nearly enough.

“Don’t regret me,” he interrupts Aziraphale’s lively monologue on posy rings, nails digging in the doorjamb. “Whatever happens—don’t regret me.”

The angel frowns, nearly taking a step back, but ultimately steadying against the instinct. 

“Why would I?”

“I am regrettable,” Crowley says simply. 

“Not to me.”

“Especially to you. Look at those bruises,” he points at the angel’s neck. “They have my name written all over.”

The “you” is silent. His pride might not be.

The truth is Crowley had held on to him, earlier, had hugged him back so long and hard he would have broken bones if the angel’s had any to spare.

Reflexively reaching for his own jaw, the angel rubs the junction where Crowley put his teeth to. Tiny puncture wounds freckle the pale skin. 

“They will fade,” he says at last.

“But I won’t.”

“Perhaps you will mellow,” the angel offers reasonably, patiently, sunnily. “Like a fine wine!”

“Perhaps I don’t want to mellow,” the demon taps his foot irritably. “Perhaps I want to burn!”

The angel levels his gaze. It’s colorless and clear, like an ominously still sea.

“Then perhaps you’ll be surprised to find me fireproof.”

“Not sure that’s something you’d like.”

“Test me.”

The demon grips the door knob. He could feel himself fading, blurring around the edges. He wonders if the angel has anything to do with that. Again.

“I am filled with blunt corners and sharp edges,” Crowley looks down, at the concrete floor under his socketed feet. “You must know that.”

“Don’t you think I am?”

“You’re an angel!”

“No one lives among pain and greed and death and love for this long without sharpening a few edges of their own, Crowley.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean,” the angel replies with habitual calm, but there’s something else there. Something warred and quite sharp. “Test me. I suspect you will not find me wanting.” 

*

He had first told Aziraphale in the early 1900s. There was a war raging in Europe and it didn’t seem to matter who would win. It felt wreaked, humanity did, at last broken beyond repair. Or perhaps it was all just catching up with him, all the centuries of war, peace, love, betrayal, push pull, rinse repeat.

So one night, drunk on chardonnay and on leave from Germany, Crowley whispered, “You must know,” pulling the angel’s sloppy hand from his shoulder and placing it back on the bookstore counter. 

“My knowledge is quite extensive, dear fellow,” the angel had hiccuped, wavering on his feet. “What must I know now?”

“That I am a little in love with you.”

The angel coughed, the flush of alcohol high on his round cheeks. 

“Oh dear. What a foolish thing to say.”

“Why must it be foolish?”

“Because you are a demon,” he wagged his index finger between them. “And I am an angel.”

“I was an angel too. Once.”

The angel scrunched his nose. “That was a long time ago.”

Jamming his hands under his arms, Crowley asked, “Do you find all demons unredeemable?”

The angel blinked slowly. “It is not my job to judge,” he slurred. “It is God’s.”

The demon paced around the store, a wide agitated circle. 

“I didn’t mean to fall, you know?” Each book spine he touched felt sturdy and certain, somewhat comforting in their orderly, snug place. Vertical and monochromatic like troops at parade’s rest. “Not then, not now. It just—sort of happened.”

“That sounds like poor discipline, my dear,” the angel tutted, adjusting his white bow-tie. “Nothing just happens.”

“We both know that’s not true.”

The angel flinched, fiddling with his stemware. His eyes went glossy and very far away. The demon barreled on. Because honestly if not now, when a whole continent was about to end itself, then when?

He held himself still, his black hat neatly squared in front of his hips.

“Would you consider me otherwise?”

“Consider you—?”

“As a—,” the demon prowled around the bookcases, searching for safe words. “Well. I am not quite sure. A…prospect? No no no,” he mumbled to the floor. “A… hmm…permanent fixture?” He tagged on dubiously, “Perhaps?” 

The word he wanted to use was “companion” or “spouse,” but it seemed enormously forward, borderline vulgar. So he didn’t.

“I find that highly unlikely,” the angel hiccuped again, swaying against the counter. “How could I trust you?” He waved a hand between them. For emphasis. As if emphasis was needed where rejection is concerned. “Permanently, I mean.”

Abruptly, the demon stopped pacing and strode over to the counter. 

“Aziraphale,” he leaned too close, his tone too intense to be welcomed. He knew, he just couldn't help it. “I could _never_ lie to you.”

Judiciously holding one finger up, the angel reprimanded, “That seems difficult to believe in this case.”

The demon felt his lips curl away from his teeth. “Because I am fallen?”

The angel sighed, gathering himself close. There were no wings on display and yet the demon could swear to see them, shuddering in the distance. 

“Because you are in love,” the angel said with finality and the world came nearer to shattering. 

The demon drew himself taller, put his glass down on a random bookshelf. 

“Fine.”

“Lovers are notoriously unreliable—”

“I said fine. Forget it, dismiss it, put it aside.”

The angel picked up the empty wine bottle, the lines on his forehead crunched in vague confusion. He looked down at the counter and ran his fingers over it as if to rid it of some invisible stain.

“Should I top you off?,” he offered at last.

The demon shook his head, grabbing his satchel. 

(What is it about knowledge that saddles one’s soul so terribly? Why can’t knowledge ever be light?)

“Perhaps some other time.”

*

The store is small and crowded with crooked shelves. Their elbows bump together as they walk through the aisles, perusing cat figurines and silver hairbrushes. 

Their knuckles brush every other heartbeat, the demon tallies, and his shoulders relax in their sockets. The angel wears gloves now, fine white leather with golden embroidery. He keeps them in his pockets, by the cash register, under the car seat. He keeps them on too, always and tidily, a skin weathered between them. 

The demon was in an antiques shop on a early Sunday morning, gazing at things he would never had given a second glance before, because he had been asked to. Having never let anyone come close, he did not know being asked could hold such a gravitational pull.

You see, when you are the one always asking, you forget to contemplate someone may want to demand something of you in return. An hour of your time, your favorite color, things you didn’t know were valuable so you never took trouble in keeping track. 

On a catty-cornered ladder, the angel’s hand fell on the demon’s shoulder as he perched on his toes to pull a book from a top shelf. 

Leaning his cheek against the icy pressure, Crowley let out, “I have been in love with you for far too long.”

He could hear the angel struggle above him. “Yes I know.”

“You do?”

“Of course,” the angel throws over his shoulder. “I noticed a few millennia ago. You were never subtle.”

Crowley stands a tad straighter, steps an inch farther away. 

“I don’t believe I was ever trying to be.”

“Nothing the matter with a gilded lily,” the angel bites his lips, brushing dust mites off a clothbound cover.

Crowley is again trapped by the knowledge he had long been found out, transparent and not rebuffed, but never requited either. 

It aches in a distant region, deep within himself, like a blunt nail sinking in a bare foot. He didn’t expect it to hurt any longer, not with such fresh zing, not after having been able to find a measure of reciprocity. It hurts retroactively, he realizes, which was ridiculous and very very human.

He meanders into a nearby shelf, hands shoved in his jeans.

“You could have put me out of my misery sooner, no?”

“But it wasn’t misery, was it?,” the angel turns a crumbling page in his gloved fingers. A picture of a three-layer chocolate torte flits by. “We enjoyed each other’s company.”

“Yes, I imagine we did.”

“Then all is quite alright.”

The demon didn’t have the heart to tell him that, no, not exactly. 

He paid for the book and walked out into the steely sunlight.

On the sidewalk, the angel picked up the bag, and brought the demon’s hand to his mouth.

“Your longing does not frighten me, dearest,” he said from under his lashes. “Nor does your sharpness. You are quite perfect. Tall branches and thorns and all.”

Crowley intended to ask what frightened him then, but the angel’s lips were wet, so they burned a heart-shaped rune on the demon’s palm. 

And just like that, he allowed himself to believe that, yeah okay why not? Perhaps it would be alright. 

*

It wasn't. 

They meet for lunch every day, drinks every other. 

Crowley thinks of him every minute of every hour, touches the angel on the back of his shirt, the front of his trousers, the darts on his vest, touches himself in the sticky hours between midnight and noon, between nightmares, between outings, holds the angel’s gloved hand in parks and restaurants and buses and crowded museum cafes, mornings and mid-afternoons, the wee hours of the night when he can’t sleep he touches himself again and gasps out loud, “it’s you, it’s always been you” and “please let me in, please,” nonsense really that if he had not been shut out of heaven and hell already he surely would be by now, for daftness and sentimentality if not exactly for lust, for it’s not lust as much as an abysmal form of loneliness what spurs him on. 

Very few can survive it: the ordeal of being found wanting after having given it your all.

But Crowley is far from ordinary, having been throughly acquainted with rejection before. He knows that pain is but a consequence of wanting the mile when you barely got hold of an inch, the fruit on the high branch when the ground is crawling with seedling. 

So he kisses the angel’s white-gloved knuckles on his doorstep every other night, prim and proper like the Victorian gentleman he never was. He kisses the inside of his wrist too for good measure, and tells the angel who might very well kill him if they ever find themselves inside each other again, biblically this time, tells the only other being in Creation he would want to be destroyed by, “Let me have you.”

And the angel laughs, his bubbly aloof laughter, smug right at the edges but so very soft in the center, where it matters, at his core.

“Dear fellow, I don’t believe that would be very wise.”

“We don’t have to be wise anymore, angel. Just happy.”

The angel frowns, looking down at his pristine Edwardian brogues.

“I find no happiness in hurting you,” he says, tempered and fond and infuriatingly earnest.

“Don’t you see?,” Crowley urges, gripping his hand harder, scuffing his lambskin toes. “I don’t care if it kills me! I don’t care if you finish me off!”

“Well I do,” the angel cants his chin up proudly. “Care. I care greatly for our friendship.”

The demon leans in, a breath from an open-mouth kiss. 

“Run away with me, angel,” he pleads, eyes closed because he doesn’t want to have to see an answer if none is spoken.

It is quiet, so quiet the stars seem to ping in the clear summer sky. 

The demon breathes in, breathes out, tips an invisible top hat.

“May your dreams be sweet,” he curtsies and drops the angel’s hand.

Whistling, he ambles down the deserted street, no care in the world but the familiar burden of those who refuse to learn their lesson, refuse to stop asking questions long after answers had been asked for.

He has not yet reached his car when his phone rings. 

“Crowley,” the angel murmurs in a big rush of air, “Crowley, please. I’m trying.”

They breathe into the silence, but neither finds anything else to say. Words sometimes fail when touch is forbidden.

Feeling brave for once, Crowley depresses the power button.

Their whole stop-motion dance is not enough to scare him off, but it’s enough to make him wonder: what exactly would a demon be willing to give to keep an angel every day, every way, for as long as they shall live?


	3. Oxygen (O2)

“Why so many plants?”

The angel stood in the middle of the sunroom, speculatively running two fingers over rubbery greenery. 

They visited now. Like a turn-of-the-century couple stuck in a rural courtship. In the afternoons, standing up, a good five feet apart. It’s difficult not to see it as regression, as a going back, not just in time and speed, but in distance. 

(Sometimes this business of love felt like an impossibly painstaking task only humans would have patience to muddle through because their life was short enough for minutia to matter. More and more Crowley wondered if he was incapable of loving. If what he felt was a yawning emptiness baying for warmth).

“I am not the kind of demon who enjoys the company of my kind,” Crowley explained, waving a mister around. “Nor can I mix well with humans.”

The angel frowned, the prettiest little imperfection in his impeccable midcentury posture.

“So?”

There’s many ways to disarm a bomb, though twice as less as to disarm a heart. Crowley knew at least twenty of the former but only two of the latter. He could lie, or he could say, “So I am lonely, angel. I have always been lonely.”

The angel jumped a little, knocking over a fern.

“Oh! Oh dear, so very sorry,” he kneeled down and babbled as he scooped soil into the upturned pot. “Oh. Yes. Well. I imagine it might be quite dismal without God’s grace.”

Crowley debated if he should snap his fingers and make it all go away. Instead he went to the kitchen and poured himself three fingers worth of scotch. 

He leaned against the counter and watched Aziraphale wash dirt-clotted hands in the sink. 

“Do you really believe that?”

The angel held himself inhumanly still, and for a while all there was between them was the sound of soapy flesh sliding together. Crowley poured himself three more fingers, ignoring the pointed glare Aziraphale gave him.Then he thought better of it, and just took a swig right off the bottle. 

“No,” the angel said at last, turning the tap off. “No, I don’t. Not with certainty anyway.”

“So why do you still parrot them? All the damned celestial preachings?”

The angel shrugged and the air filled with the damp smell of graveyards. “It seems easier.”

“Easier than what?”

And for once the angel’s placid mouth grew teeth, tiny but very very sharp. 

“Dedicating so much time to growing immaculate house plants, for once.”

Crowley nodded. He could understand that, fear, defensiveness, antagonism. He could understand it very well indeed.

The alcohol rushed too quickly through his bloodstream. It was a new one, a fledgling this bloodstream he got himself now, and he should know better to handle it with care. And yet—well. It was still him, inside, always the same essence really, and he, they, the fallen angel, demon, Crowley, Anthony, nameless forgotten underling, adversary-cum-something-else-or-another, he couldn’t help drop his shaded eyes to the angel’s lips, lean in until his nose nearly grazed the angel’s shoulder.

“Are you lonely, angel?,” he whispered, low and longing.

The angel stiffened and instinctively stepped away. 

“I have my books, my store, my faith,” he told his freshly cleaned hands. “Humans are ever-fascinating creatures too. I enjoy being surrounded by them.”

“I once believed they could sense me,” Crowley mused before tipping the bottle back. It burned going down but then again everything was going to burn from now on, right? Suntans, and boiling water, and strychnine. Old buried memories. “I used to think they could feel that little shift in the air, the tingle on their spine when I walked by. Once, I did.”

The angel regarded him with the kind of curiosity adults dedicate to precocious children and baby animals.

“Would _that_ have brought you joy?”

“I am not sure,” Crowley admitted. “I think I envied them. Their carefreeness and ignorance bracketed by mortality.”

“And now?”

“Now—,” he looked down and pressed a hand to the angel’s breastplate. His head swirled pleasantly, and his sunglasses slipped down his nose. “Now I wish you’d love me the way humans love each other.”

For the second time that afternoon, the angel took a step back. This time he placed himself fully out of reach, and Crowley swayed unsteadily. 

“I care for you,” Aziraphale said. “I always will in my own way.”

“You wouldn’t run away with me.”

“That wouldn’t have been my way.”

“You mean God’s way?”

“I don’t know if I fully grasp the distinction.”

“Perhaps when you will, you’ll understand.”

Another frown. Less kind this one. Oh well. Bottoms up.

“Understand what?”

Crowley walked across the kitchen towards the floor-to-ceiling glass window. It was a sad summer day. Would all days be sad from here on out, haunted by the specter of death? Or would they be free? Would he fall in love like humans do? Marry a nice gal, father a naughty child? Would he pass on at home surrounded by grandchildren or in a hospital bed, alone? Would the angel come to his bedside to take his last confession, or would he avert his eyes when something or another plucked the breath right out of his body? 

The thought alone, of fifty or forty years without Aziraphale, made the cosmos seem small and humanity puny. 

Still. Better than a limbo. Better than fear and shame and never belonging to yourself. 

“Understand what, Crowley?,” the angel insisted, feet apart and fists bunched, a warrior’s stance, and Crowley thought if this was a good time as any to tell him he was colorblind. That he had no favorite color because, for a demon, there was only shadow and light. 

Instead he told the bleary sun, “That loneliness does not come with falling, angel. It comes with finding yourself alone on the landing.” 

The angel made an exasperated noise, fussy and overlong. “You sound like a mortal now.”

“Well, maybe I’m becoming one.”

“That’s a rather ignoble joke,” he scolded with a prim tilt of his nose, but there was alarm in it, enough to draw him across the room. 

“Perhaps because it isn’t a joke,” Crowley turned from the window, taking his sunglasses off. “I made a bargain.”

“A bargain?”

“Hmm. My freedom for my immortality. It’s not exactly forgiveness but it beats eternal persecution.”

The angel stilled. His voice seemed shrill and shallow at the same time, a rather impressive feat. 

“Why would you do such a _stupid, stupid_ thing!?”

It was Crowley’s turn to shrug. 

“For the pleasure of finitude, I reckon? Now I can enjoy living knowing it will end, and that nothing I do or don’t do will have larger consequences. No more looking over my shoulder, no more indoor sunglasses. No more overseers or sides.” His voice dropped purposefully, “No more burning when an angel touches my skin.”

No more hiding, he thinks, but _that_ he does not say.

The angel yelped with his mouth and his hands, a wound-up toy whose strings had been pulled by a wild child.

“You will die!”

Crowley looked at him, in the pale grey kitchen in his old beige suit, and for the first time in millennia, he felt pity. 

“Everything in the universe dies, Aziraphale,” he said quietly. “Even the stars.”

“Not you! Not me!”

“No—_not you_,” Crowley hissed, darting his head forward. “Just you and you alone now, _angel_.”

The angel stopped pacing. He had been pacing for a while now, short, curt stomps. He stabbed a finger across the distance, as if trying and failing to bruise skin across the air.

“I can’t forgive you for this!”

And that was when the demon knew they were in a fight, a sweeping, rapidly escalating, hard-till-it-breaks kind of fight. 

“Right. You couldn’t keep me either, could you!?,” Crowley spat back, moved by a violence he didn’t know he had. “Besides, I’m used to being unforgivable!”

A light ignited in Aziraphale’s eyes, raw and cruel, but as fast as it flared it flailed. 

“Take it back! Just—” and then his voice broke. The angel’s voice broke, and with it his face, which in turn made Crowley’s heart break too. “Please,” and he was begging now, his shoulders sinking and shaking. “Please, darling. You _must_ take it back.”

It seemed ludicrous to have such a serious conversation at 2pm in an empty kitchen while only one of them was sober, and neither was in each other’s arms. 

Life was ludicrous, though. Crowley touched the ring of burns on his right wrist and put his sunglasses back on. 

“If there’s something I learnt from falling, angel, is that there’s no going back. We are all doomed to keep going forward.”

*

Loss happens when you are not looking. Crowley knows this, which makes the silence all the easier to endure at first.

It is the angel kneeling on his bed that troubles him, manifested out of thin air while he slept, his hair teased out into tortured peaks, the wrinkles in his face electric with nerves. 

“What are you doing here?" There's a stain on his lapel, mulched and dark. "Was I screaming in my sleep again?”

The angel slouches back on his thighs, a compact punch of champagne-colored anxiety drawing crestfallen circles on his sheets, and Crowley suspects this is going to be bad— spectacularly, irreversibly bad. He knows it for sure when Aziraphale makes a point of catching his eye, hands locked in prayer on his lap, before hurling unceremoniously,

“I love you.”

Crowley releases a stalled exhale, reaching for the cigarettes on his nightstand. 

“Yeah I know.” 

“What?!”, the angel barks. “You can’t know!”

Crowley takes the time to light up a Mayfair, lets the smoke spill out of his oval mouth.

“Of course I do,” he dismisses. “You were always my best friend. Even when I wasn’t yours.”

“You can’t know,” the angel scoots closer, his breath smelling of wine. “_I_ didn’t know! Not like _this_.”

“Didn’t you?”

“For God’s sake, Crowley!,” he throws his hands up. “This _hurts_!”

“Oh and we both know how adverse to pain you are,” Crowley blows smoke away from the angel’s exasperated face, pained with frustration, graveled with the mortifying ordeal of being known. Crowley smiles a supercilious smile.

“I am an angel!,” Aziraphale insists, stabbing the mattress emphatically. He’s still wearing his nice corduroy suit and leather oxfords, the same as three days prior. “Pain and suffering are not in my nature!”

“Nor self-awareness, it seems.”

Aziraphale gives him the side-eye. “Questioning is what your lot does. And look where it landed you!”

Crowley finally takes pity on him and leans in, running lips against the inseam of the angel’s starched collar, feeling him shiver. “In your arms, it seems. Looks like a fair trade to me,” he muses before pulling back to finish his smoke.

For a long moment they stay there, tucked together in bed, the plated glow of the moon streaming around the outlines of their bodies. It makes Crowley nostalgic for another time, pensive for a party he never attended, a song he never heard, the people he never met. It startles him when the angel mutters, “Take it back.”

Crowley takes his hand, wilted next to his knee, and squeezes it, “I can’t, angel.”

“You will die!”

“So you said.”

“What will I do without you?”

Making a show of considering it, Crowley puts out the smoke on the wall behind him. 

“You could stay with me till death do us part.”

The angel turns this face as if a great offense had been presented to him. 

“That sounds blasphemous to say the least.”

“And to say the most?”

“I don’t know?,” and doubt must have rooted deep because he crumbles too swiftly, shoulders careening towards Crowley, eyes mired in shadows. “Frightful? Heavenly?”

“Both?”

“Both,” Aziraphale sighs, dropping his eyes away, and for an instant it’s delightful. The vulnerable heart of him carved open like a saint’s reliquary, begging a demon to come and sort out the loose pieces.

And then Crowley can’t help it and shows this hand.

“Could be a good life, though. Lunch dates and wine bars and weekend drives. Mornings in bed and midnight strolls where I would be at your mercy.” Crowley kisses each knuckle until Aziraphale tips forward, seeking his mouth, seeking shelter, relenting. “Think about it. Frail human me.”

His lips are unusually warm and taste vaguely of black tea, the strong stuff he takes to think through conundrums and crosswords. It burns, but Crowley swallows the pain down with the angel's waterlogged lust.

“A cold can kill you,” he whispers into Crowley’s mouth.

“So could holy water.”

(Or love, he wants to say. Remember, angel? We believed love could kill us, that’s why you kept me at arm’s length and that’s why I let you. Remember all those centuries?) 

Crowley moves his hand to the back of the angel’s neck, smooths down the unruly hair, and lowers him into the mattress. 

”There’s an endless laundry list of perils, of impossibly random—,” he babbles on as Crowley undoes his buttons, one by one. “Oh _please_, take it back.”

“We could rent a cottage by the seaside,” a kiss to his throat, one to his right shoulder. “Or perhaps move to Paris. You always did favor their food.”

They are having two different conversations now, clear as day and right as rain, which Crowley decides to ignore in favor of enjoying himself.

Aziraphale, the creature he set his heart on several lifetimes ago, shatters that best laid plan with four simple words, 

“Or I could fall.”

His body moves for him, pinning him straight and tall against the black headboard. Aziraphale follows, sitting back up with endearing clumsiness. When his eyes land on Crowley’s though, all softness is gone. They glimmer, a ribbing of something shrewd and oxidized, diamond hard, occupying the pupils, large and settled. 

Feigning insouciance, Crowley waves a hand to the side. 

“Now why would you want to do that?”

“Oh I think you know,” says the angel, eyes narrowing and lips ticking up.

“To hurt me?”

“I told you. Pain and suffering are not in my nature. To be so suddenly acquainted with both may make me altogether unpredictable.”

In spite of himself, Crowley snorts, once again showing his hand against his better judgment. No point in gilding this lily if they are to be married. 

“I always knew you and I were cut from the same cloth, angel.”

Pursing his lips, Aziraphale holds his own with admirable aplomb, aristocratic shoulders set in a line that brooks no argument. He seems to pause, canting his head, before deciding to ask, 

“Wicked, you mean?”

Crowley's grin grows, splits into a blatant Valentine. It doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter who knows. He’s too far gone anyway, fallen beyond the point of rescue. 

“Oh god no,” he affects in fond falsetto. “Human.”


	4. Fluorine (F2)

They do not see each other again. 

For seven days and eight nights it rains enough to rival a prehistoric deluge. The city, ill-equipped to deal with continual lightning strikes, stops all modes of transportation, aerial and otherwise. 

Chaos breaks out at the four-day mark. Rivers overflow and cars tumble into ditches never to get out again. One catches fire as it collides with a church, burning down a small fortune in fourteenth-century relics. Ceilings fall off and lovers fall out.

From his bedroom window, Crowley watches thunder shake the earth off its hinges, the rain fistfight the trees and the sky pour out its tears. He watches and is not quite sure which one of them is responsible for such mayhem. Either is possible, but both is too staggering an option to fully entertain.

So he doesn’t.

*

Changing is a slow and dubious process, messily divided between an “after” and a “before” that are so deeply entangled together Crowley gets cross-eyed looking at the bathroom mirror, trying to pinpoint where one begins and the other ends. They, the demon, him, the human.

“I imagine I’m his all the same,” he concludes, peering impatiently at slitted yellow eyes, waiting for them to communicate through color and shape that he has been transformed, shapeshifted into not what he was made out to be, but what he chose to become.

Time crawls and splinters. He lets his hair grow out, waits, drinks copious amounts of sparkling wine, sits with legs dangling off the seventeenth floor and holds the rain at bay long enough for the trains to start running again. 

They don’t call each other, they don’t see each other, and by all accounts one would think they don’t seek each other either.

However, in the steepest part of the night, when even the trees let go of some of their weight, Crowley wakes up to a razor-sharp coldness pressing on his neck and wrists. Curled on his side, he presses back and, like a sentient ghost, the cold spreads all along his arms and legs. 

It’s not exactly an embrace but it’s as close as they seem to get, so Crowley, knowledgeable of the preciousness of small mercies, takes it and keeps it, belted tight around his heart.

*

He sits on a park bench, alone, arm outstretched as if protecting a body that is not there. 

It’s a pristine sunny day, miraculous after all the diluvial storms, so people are out and about, picnicking, holding hands, laughing. Crowley flicks his wrist and a man trips, dropping his cellphone in the pond.

“Wicked,” a voice chirps. He jerks to find a girl sitting next to him. Bright auburn hair, much like his own, but chopped in blunt bangs. She is wearing a denim skirt and a thousand golden bracelets. 

“I beg your pardon?”

“Lovely day, no?” the girl says, turning. Her eyes are the greenest Crowley has ever seen, nearly eclipsing the iris. Like his, he thinks, but not quite. Like a pistil on a flower, if the flower was poisonous.

She smiles, a tight-lipped smile in a perfectly heart-shaped face. She has red lipstick on olive skin, and a dark sense of humor covering up a myriad secrets darker still. Distractedly Crowley wonders if this is the type of person he should fall for once he becomes fully human. 

The girl frowns.

“Then again, loveliness is probably what got you in this binder.”

Unexpectedness still delights him. It’s how a demon got to fall in love, after all. 

Pushing his sunglasses down his nose, Crowley grins, “Is that right now?”

The girl stares at him, her back ramrod straight, her eyes too big for her doll face. She sits like Aziraphale does, down to the unnervingly stiff feet and priggishly folded hands. Like ballet dancers. Like infantry men. 

“It can only get better,” she drawls, and he can hear the silver wire in it now, unearthly and cool, a life-giving reactive gas.

So this might be how he goes. Not with Aziraphale. On a park bench, of all places, but not with Aziraphale. Ludicrous. 

Crowley, not one for regrets, finds a stray one in his back pocket: that he will never tell the angel that—what? Well, that it’s been him all along. It’s always been him. The weathervane, the firmament, and the waters above.

Sprawling back, liquid, Crowley affects his best louche smile.

“Pray tell. What’s about to get better?”

“Whatever is bothering you.”

“Perhaps nothing is bothering me,” he shrugs, looking away. He might be doomed but he is not going to make it any easier.

The girl sighs, sounding bored and wise.

“What is yours can never be lost," she says as if love and faith were kids' toys. "It will _always_ find you.” 

She scrapes her black leather boot on the grass, tap tap tap like a sullen teenager, and something in Crowley snaps. 

“What about you mind your own blasted business huh? Go read fortunes to tourists outside St. Pancras!” 

And it’s when he clicks his fingers and nothing happens that he knows something is very very wrong.

“Now now,” the girl tuts, lips glowing redder. “Hardly the end of the world.”

Reckless to the bitter end, Crowley can’t help sneering, “Oh and you’d know much about it, would you?”

The girl is standing all of a sudden, a hand on his shoulder. She feels cold, abysmally so, like the utmost spike on a star.

His spine immediately balks under the pressure of her touch, chest caving to knees. The mark on his sideburn coils defensively. The words rush through him, bleeding out of his mouth.

_Fuck_, roars in his mind but aloud he’s whining, “He didn’t love me before. When I was more. How can he love me now...when... when...I’m so much—less?”

The air is singed with fluorine, the pungent mustard of nothingness. His shoulder burns, the oldest pain in the Good Book, all the way down to his groin.

She squeezes again and his head springs up, entranced by arsenic green eyes and the bubblegum-pink purse tied around her waist. 

“Have some faith, Crawly.” 

And then he blinks and the girl is gone. 

The sun is setting when Crowley realizes something inside him stings. A physical pain, like salt poured on an open wound. Caustic, yes, but also clean.

*

It happens one morning, on the twenty-first day, when summer is dying and sunlight hurts his eyes. 

It begins as a needling pain and then a vague itching on his lower back. When he touches it, the gold thread comes apart like ashes.

Running fingers over the scalding skin, Crowley wishes Aziraphale was there to tell him what it looked like, his tailbone rid of God's handwriting. 

He tries to see it on a mirror, but the angle is all wrong and his eyesight is not what it used to be. 

*

When he comes (because of course he would, of course, given enough time of course he would come, how could he not?), the ceiling is streaked with autumn shadows and the floor littered with Pepsi bottles. 

Crowley rises up on his elbows, his night vision weak, weakening, changing, his skin prickling, frightened of everything that is new and frighted with everything that is old—pain and fatigue and habit and love too. He struggles to make out the angel standing in the dark room, to process the sterile white light emanating off his naked body, wings tucked around his round shoulders and hands kind with emptiness and eyes full with comfort, at ease bare as only a being untouched by shame ever could, at ease with giving in as only a being untouched by refusal could ever be.

“You are here,” Crowley blurts out as if the words were pulled down by gravity, as if the ground wanted them back. And the angel reaches out, shyly turning his eyes away, 

“I don’t believe I was ever anywhere else but with you.”

Before Crowley could take the proffered hand, the room ripples and shifts into a garden, hunter-green trees silhouetted by navy-blue vines, the branches bled black against the asphalt sky, a pantomime of Eden, or is it of Earth seen from outer space? 

Misty nebulas swirl around his ankles as he walks up, cushion his human feet that can no longer take hardship without protection.

When he holds the angel’s hand in his, it does not burn. When he lifts the angel’s hand to his lips, it does not hurt.

He leans his whole weight on that lukewarm palm, the universe contracting into a gentle glow.

“You were there the first time I laughed,” he murmurs into the nautilus of the angel’s hand. 

Hope folds into the confession, shields the question at its core.

“And I will be there for the last time too,” Aziraphale vows, and there’s no rightful answer for that surrender but to let his forehead fall against the angel’s shoulder and sway—a little, in place, hand in hand—the slowest dance two immortal beings ever dared to try out.


	5. Astatine (At)

He has not often thought this, but he does now, lying face to face with a creature he has only seen clothed, not just in fabric but in lies, the ceiling of his bedroom hollowed out into a shifting sky, purple clouds feathering the stratosphere in gaseous bursts of oxygen and astatine and carbon, he thinks it now as he struggles not to push his thumb through the half-parted lips of an angel, the slit not big enough to fit his first knuckle without force, he thinks, "What if not even you can make up for my loss? What if not even an Angel of God can absolve me of my restlessness, of my hunger for knowledge, my hubris for wholeness? What if there’s no end to how much I want, and swallowing you whole is the kindest thing I can do to you because otherwise I’ll cut you up in smaller pieces and decorate the night sky with your broken bones. What then?," Crowley thinks before trailing off, the angel’s lips coming around his own, gently and cold, the flat side of a whetstone, no bite, no abrasion, placid like running water his hands and mouth are, and his forehead where it leans against Crowley's, inhumanly cool, marble, his fingers on his hair, his hair which has grown too long and untangled, unwashed and uncombed for weeks, he forgot all about it, his human hair, now shaped by someone else’s whims, now that he abdicated of his power over reality, now that he is not a full demon, not functionally anyway, not anymore (but can a demon truly change his stripes? can he abdicate of himself by simply becoming something other?)

The angel whimpers, a noise like boiling water, effervescent and strained, and Crowley thinks better not to move, better to let the angel do this, whatever this is, in my forested bed, in my planetarium room, the stage he set, better let a creature of God consecrate a mistake than spook a miracle away.

Crowley tells himself this over and over and over again, until a knee pushes between his legs, the slit there not wide enough to accommodate flesh without force either, so there’s force, not ethereal but devastating, hurtful, he registers, hurtful of a different sort, not on his skin but somewhere behind his eyes, lower in his gut, and it’s the last thought he catches, the last substantial arbitrary collection of neuro-synapses before that something else takes over, that visible, uncontainable, incorporeal force of a flame fed formidably on oxygen (love?), flowing higher, faster, festering everything red, artery-red, clay-red, the color of blood in the deepest recesses of a mortal heart, as he tackles an angel on his mattress, headfirst chest down, white wings flustered in the dark-blue room, sprawling to the ceiling, touching the stars dotted there, dipping in the Milky Way as he instinctively kicks up, against a threat, against defeat, against surrender, but mostly against Crowley who has twisted the angel’s arm over his back, hooked a leg over his hip, keeps him down by the sheer weight of his own body, of his own want, which is heavy now and dangerous with too many unspilled secrets, ignorant of how to wrangle them into submission so he twists at the angel’s arm instead, flattens his monstrous white wings with his shoulders, breathes against his neck “Don’t leave. Please,” which is not what he had in mind, definitely not what had alighted on his tongue but it is what he says anyways, when the angel wrestles under him, the expansive heaving of his ribcage going so very still as he turns his head to the side and whispers, “Let me go, Crowley,” he says as if it was a reasonable request, a sustainable option in this precarious state they are in, as if he knew of another miraculous way to conquer the volatile things that scare you, the love you have but never parsed, the fear you have but never portioned, “Let me go, my love,” he says again, his pink lips puffed raw, his white wings fallen to the sides, drooped, flaxen, a hand stroking a shaking thigh, and Crowley thinks, "I’m shaking, when did this happen, why am I shaking?," his viselike grip on Aziraphale’s wrist and nape unrelenting, would have killed him by now, fractured him into little pieces if he was any less godly. I could kill him, Crowley realizes, as he releases the plump naked body beneath his, letting go as if holding a burning metal lever, oh god, I want to, I want to, I want to—and it is not explicable by any other means, not by words he ever bothered learning, what happens when the angel sits up and puts his arms around him, pulls him unconfined and unrefined as he is, a mess of a human, a hazardous medley of unstable halogens, into his lap and hums, “Now now, love is diatomic, bound as we are, we can never break free” and it’s a strange thing to hear coming from a being who did not assemble stars to a being who once created nebulas, that knows molecules can be disassembled, pried apart, but it’s kind nonetheless, Crowley can still recognize kindness, empirically at least, he thinks he can, head buried in the angel’s neck, their bodies so startling human in the imperfections of their porous skins, in the hair on their arms and chests, coarse and colored different, and the shape of their cocks nestled together, coiled tight and hard and wet with confused longing, the red in his hair much more obscene now, now that he can half-see it through his changeling eyes, against the powdered white of the angel’s.

(No, not kill him, _keep_ him, safe captive hard, keep him here mine always—why does it feel the same if it is so different, the sentiment of want and hurting, was I not meant to know the difference? what did it take to learn—oh)

The angel brushes the coarse hair back, undisturbed by it, unhurt by it now. He lies back and pulls Crowley down, onto him, his supple legs coming around to steady him. Aziraphale’s smile is so soft Crowley fears that touching it will be to erase it, like writings on the sand, too close to water to last. His body tells him he needs to get inside, to find a wormhole, a chute, into the center of such silence, of such certainty, that inside it he’ll be safe, inside him he will be whole. It’s not a promise of company, it’s the promise of solace that moves him now, to carefully trace the divot on the angel’s hips, the roundness of his stomach, his thumb pressing where a navel should be, if Aziraphale had been born and not made. Maybe I can imprint one, Crowley thinks, maybe I can give an angel a new life. 

A vanity project, a veneer, to shore him up as he tries to do this thing he’s spent millennia seeing humans do, to conquer divinity by means of their bodies, by punishing them, or starving them, or indulging them, by shaping them into prayer hands and blessed tongues, turning them bodies heavenwards, which he does, or tries to, as he cants the angel’s hips up and splays his bare thighs apart, the panic of it as he knows there will be no return, there will be no going back from this, and he shouldn’t want to go back but he does, rewind the long strip of history until he is but a sinuous shape catching sun in a walled garden and the buzz of bees is the least of his troubles because nothing rots yet, nothing spoils, he can stay there, on the grass, Aziraphale on the gate, they could be two non-diatomic components for once, survive in their oneness, survive without having to bear the knowledge of what it means to be sundered apart and spend millennia trying to go back to that, to that, to that—oh, it’s colder inside him than it is on his surface, like the ocean, the ice rests inside, in the marianna trench perpetually starved of sunlight, outside the angel is all oatmeal warmth and sunflower smiles but inside, inside—Crowley falls, his forehead hitting the angel’s shoulder who keeps him there, both hands in his hair, kissing it, thrusting up slowly, another way he is gentle, the way he opens his body up, gives it away without any secret clauses, and it crosses Crowley’s mind if he could—no, certainly he couldn’t, it’s been centuries, he couldn’t be the first—the angel would have—wouldn’t he?—but it’s a lovely fantasy anyway, for all the seconds it lasts. 

He has not thought it often, but he did then, when the angel looked him in the eye and pressed their hips together, insisting in keeping him so deep inside Crowley can’t move, can’t breathe, can’t blink for fear it will all fall apart, their tendons and their organs and their brains, like sticks on a storm, shoveled at a first hint of wind, and pleasure is so taut and tense along his spine it makes him want to snap in two, become two elements again even though he knows, he knows now that they can never go back to that, to being separates, they are this now, a torso with four legs and two heads and one heart, but as he tries and fails to unfurl his wings, itching as they are right below the skim of the firmament, as he realizes they have now slithered beyond his reach, his beautiful black wings burned just right by his own making, Crowley panics and thinks, as the angel gasps in staccato, the wetness pooling stickier between their bellies—his, his, theirs—Crowley thinks that he doesn’t want it anymore, he wants to take it back, humanity, sickness, mortality, he wants _this_ instead, this theirs, he wants it forever, he will stay inside Aziraphale forever and no one, _no one_, no god or devil, morning star or waters above, can come and pull him away, can be a match for this covalent force, for he will tear them all down or be torn apart by them, but it is his now, this this this _absolute_ sense of self, of purpose, of belonging, of rooting where home is given a name, and the name is his and his only, “beloved” he murmurs into the angel’s panting mouth right before the magnetic tape of his mind is wiped out, blackened by release, by Aziraphale’s scream, just one piercing wailing scream, lifting them both off the bed for an instant, cream wings upright and stiff, Crowley’s like an echo in the impossible distance, shooting up and sprawling, imitating in sympathy the horror and joy of being allowed to have and to hold, waiving their shiny sable feathers once, twice, and then fading into the ether, a ghost saying its goodbyes. 

It takes them a long moment to come back, to return to each other, the walls covered in foot-deep cracks and flying feathers, the furniture moved around or simply disassembled into heaps of splintered rosewood. 

Refusing to let go, Crowley pushes into the body heaving under his, harder, rougher than any of them would favor. They are soaked, he notices almost immediately, so much so Aziraphale’s hair has turned sandy brown, his a burnt ochre. The angel is blotched all over, as if he had battled a fever and lost, his chest and nipples and neck scratched with tallon-thin gashes. He is breathing all too fast, his eyes glassy and remote, startled into awe, the type of expression you see in portraits of the Annunciation but much less benevolent. His mouth is moving of its own accord between belabored breaths, and it’s then that Crowley first thinks of running away, of getting up and taking the stairs three at a time until he’s down on the streets and far away from any crime scene. 

Folding both hands under the angel’s head, he leans an ear over twitching lips. The words are garbled, looping, but he thinks he hears Rosary and Angelus prayers, protective incantations in languages long forgotten. Untrained for comfort, Crowley does what was done to him, placing his arms around the angel’s shivering frame. “Shhhh,” he hums, “now now. It’s not the end of the world.” He is cautious not to dislodge himself though, thinking all the while of his cock as a thorn, a bullet, surgical stainless steel. The damage is done, he is not giving up his roosting, not giving up his resting place. “He’s mine now,” he states with a conviction so stern it must come from God. 

Under him, Aziraphale shudders, wings lax like dead leaves, his eyes so full they threaten to overrun and stain the silver sheets. Blue everywhere, the rarest color in nature, an anomaly, Crowley thinks as he curls around the angel, wingless himself but his body is strong, has carried him through death and back, through sin and back, it can shore up a lot, it can shelter a lot too, a lot of two at least, and so he vows, mouth to the corner of an angel’s mouth, coiled inside the angel’s cooling flesh, “Screw the rest of the periodic table. You’re mine like oxygen and I’m yours like oxygen, and I'm keeping you. Be it by survival or by combustion.”

*

Later, Aziraphale would comb slow fingers through curling red hair and Crowley would ask, huddled against bare skin, 

“Why did you come?” 

“How could I not?” 

“Why did you leave then? All the other times before?”

“I lied. You frighten me.” Crowley stiffened and the angel gathered him close. “I can’t bear the idea of losing you.”

“You can’t lose me, angel. I never was anyone’s but yours. Sod God and Satan.”

There was something to be said about that bit of blasphemy, something spored and desperate neither of them knew how to best address. 

Instead, Aziraphale dipped his nose in Crowley’s hair and, breathing him in, asked, the sound of a bell that couldn’t be unrung, 

“How do you feel?”

And hiding his face in the angel’s chest, Crowley would admit, 

“Like a book with the covers pulled off.”

The angel frowned, misunderstanding. 

“Incomplete?”

The man shook his head once.

“Vulnerable.”


	6. Chlorine (Cl2)

When you are accustomed to pain, you live between the heartbeats when it does not hurt. You hold on to your breathing, fearing this will be the exhale that brings pain back. 

That’s how Crowley would describe finding love reciprocated, finding an angel on his doorstep every morning. If he had the language, that is, he would describe happiness as a riptide— not a constant state, but a sudden summersault. 

Lucky, yes, but reliable? God no! Never.

He couldn't get used to it. Loneliness would come again, he knew, and with it pain, of course, but what were the damned but used to suffering? 

Well, call it humanity gaining ground on him but Crowley found himself having more and more trouble fencing off happiness, particularly when the angel held his hand across a restaurant table and sighed between bites, “You fill me with such joy, dear fellow.”

Crowley would drop his eyes to the pretty floral china, coffee and strawberry cake intact, and grit out, “Have mercy, will you?”

Dabbing his soft mouth with a lace napkin, Aziraphale would let go of his hand only to gather the last crumbs with a fork. 

“And why,” he would demure with a downward glance, pink icing on his cupid’s bow, “would I ever want to do that?”

*

There is a cottage up north by the coast, with an indoor greenhouse and a garden facing some cliffs. 

Neither leaves their residences in London, but mortal time is strange, so it’s hard to tell if the totality of days they spend in the cottage makes it more or less of a home.

It used to be a church, the house did. Back in the Middle Ages, a squatty, stone-walled thing. But surely that’s not here nor there on why they settled upon it. 

All it matters is that there’s a Victorian glass nursery where Aziraphale spends most of his mornings reading, and a modest front yard overrun with jasmine bushes where Crowley takes up drawing. Black and white charcoal landscapes with blue smeared on the edges, cobalt and aquamarine and lapis lazuli. He has a favorite color after all, he tells the angel when he joins him at dusk, kissing smudged fingers uncaring of toxic paint. 

“Do you now?”, the angel teases. 

“Yes," Crowley nods eagerly, “it’s blue.” 

“Any blue?”

“All the blue.” 

And the angel laughs his pocket-size smile, the one with the little tassels at the ends. 

Nuzzling into Crowley’s neck, curls damp with sea-spray, he murmurs, “Blue is a lovely color, my dear.” 

“Blue like your eyes,” Crowley puts his arms around the angel’s waist, reeling him in. “Blue like the Virgin’s robe, blue like the Earth,” swaying softly, and the angel chuckles now, amused and a bit endeared. 

The setting sun hits every freckle and every wrinkle in his smiling face and Crowley wishes he could live forever, if forever meant more time to keep finding new ways to love something so familiar.

It’s a silly thought though, an _impossible_ thought, so he fondles it tenderly and steps away.

*

They put some of the drawings on the walls. Crowley does not find them any good, but Aziraphale dove so enthusiastically into the whole endeavor of scouring for the ideal eighteenth-century frames that it would be a shame not to make use of them. 

So Crowley hammers some nails under Aziraphale’s fussy specifications, and by the end of winter their living room resembles a museum with a curatorial identity crisis, ominous charcoal renditions of eclipses and midnight forests sitting next to Regency snuffboxes, vintage vinyls, and cherubic figurines. 

“It looks ridiculous,” he tells the angel, hammer in hand and hand on hip, overlooking the disorder of his mind framed in ornate gilded wood. 

A hand between Crowley’s shoulder-blades, face turned not at the wall but at his back, the angel replies, “They are exquisite.”

Clarity is not something a demon was built to enjoy, but as Crowley held Aziraphale’s gaze, it felt like a gift. After all, it was true: most of his black trees did look feathered. 

He leaned into Aziraphale’s touch, the welcome and strength of him, until he felt completely gathered in his arms.

“I don’t miss them,” he presses into the angel’s throat, fingers folding over his vest, and it’s not so much an admission as it is an achievement, saying those words out loud. 

*

“When it rained, that first time?”

“Hmm?,” the angel hums over the creased spine of his paperback.

“You held my hand.”

“Did I?”

“Yes. You held your wing over my head and my hand in yours.”

Without taking his eyes off the page, the angel nods, “If you say so.”

“Why did you do it?”

“Instinct?,” he proposes automatically. “Kindness is in my nature.”

“Was that all?”

With a long-suffering sigh, Aziraphale drapes the book on French patisserie over his knee. The low light catches the curls in his hair, longer and blonder than they’ve ever been before.

“No.”

“So?,” Crowley perches on his chair across the small living room. 

“So I don’t know,” the angel waves his hand dismissively and Crowley knows he caught something on the tip of his fishing hook.

“Yes you do.”

“Fine,” the angel capitulates, dog-earing a page and putting the book down on his reading table. “But you shall not like it.”

“Let me be the judge of that,” Crowley quips, joyfully pouring wine into two highball glasses. 

The angel frowns at the misuse of stemware, but accepts the proffered drink, eyebrows perking over gold-rimmed glasses.

“Well, you seemed so frail wobbling there in your ragged tunic with your burnished wings I could still smell the smoke in them you know?”

His voice slams through the words so swiftly it takes Crowley a moment to swing from glowing comfort to absolute shock.

“Oh,” he mouths, falling back into his wingback chair. “Oh. You took pity on me.”

“Well…”

“You pitied me,” Crowley mumbles, his heart going very still and his stomach growing very empty. He knows this feeling all too well. An altitude drop. “You pitied a fallen angel that didn’t know how to stand.”

“Dear, now now…” Aziraphale’s voice sounds urgent but his legs are still neatly crossed, Crowley notices. He feels strangely alone, like the last 'for sale' house in a row of bustling new homes. 

“I thought you odd,” Crowley is sharing before he can stop himself, before fear can pull the drawbridge back up again. “A bit too reckless for your own good. Amusing though. I thought, ‘he smiles at my words. Wonder if I can keep making him smile'.”

“And you did.”

As soundlessly as the inhuman creature he is, the angel has come to kneel at his feet. It startles Crowley to find him there, so preciously tucked into a heap of oatmeal wool. 

_A cluster of goodness,_ he thinks looking down at Aziraphale’s pleading eyes, _with a knife to my heart._

That's not true though, not really. The truth is there’s no armor against the openness of love. Unlike Hell, cramped and bound, love is a forest. Like anything else in Nature, it is as beautiful as it is dangerous, its vulnerability harboring delight as much as disaster. He lives there now, with Aziraphale. They made their home out in the unowned woods. If a fire is ever to come, it'll come for both of them.

(And he be damned if he wouldn't die snuffing every flame with his bare fingers before he'd let them singe a curl from his angel's head. Crowley may never have been a leader, not even a particularly good foot-soldier, but heaven knows he had never been a coward either.)

So without breaking eye-contact, he ventures, “Angel. Did you hold my hand because you thought me lonely?”

“Crowley,” the angel smiles, his pale blue eyes stretching with unshed tears and clapping thunder, and that other thing, light and stealthy and indestructible, kept under pressure at all times. “I held your hand because I knew we both were.”

*

There is one summer cold, vicious.

The angel hovers with smelling salts and essential oils. Day and night, day and night, day and night.

“Will you just let me vanish it away?!” 

He crouches over the couch, a hand flopping over Crowley’s sticky forehead. The white ruffles on his cuffs quiver. Crowley would laugh if it didn’t hurt to move. 

“We can’t!”, Crowley grouses for what feels the twentieth time that morning. “I need to build a functional immune system!” 

The wraith of worry blows over the angel’s face, acid with displeasure. 

He doesn’t like this: the cold sweats, the high fevers, the stench of a body fighting a virus. He doesn’t take kindly to be prevented from accomplish what he was made to do either: to heal and comfort, to ease human suffering. With a surprising violence, Aziraphale despises the unknowingness of illness, its callous unpredictability. Angels cherish consistency and quick fixes; Crowley willfully offers neither.

Fisting his nervous hand against his unhappy mouth, the angel counters, “What if it escalates into cancer or encephalitis?”

Crowley scowls from the couch. 

“I doubt that’s how human immunity works, angel.”

The angel shrugs, elegantly, furiously, a masterpiece of dramatic theatre. 

“Well, I would prefer not to risk it.”

Mustering what little strength he has left, Crowley holds Aziraphale by the elbow, keeping him from huffing out of the room. 

He’s scared, Crowley can feel it. The angel is freighted by something too heavy for his ethereal shoulders: the fear of loss, irrecuperable and ghastly, the thing that goes with bodies to the grave and takes knees to the pew.

“Tell you what,” he offers reasonably. “If I’m about to croak, then you can intervene.”

The angel peers at him over his half-turned shoulder, lips pinched in a petulant moue, “But—“

“No 'but,'” Crowley cuts off, tracing the length of his sleeve to catch his fiddling hand. “Boundaries, concessions, all that nonsense TV movies go on about. Remember?”

It’s a minor miracle to see an angel soften. Aziraphale comes around the couch, sits by Crowley’s bare feet, places their tangled hands on his knobby knee.

“You can’t die,” he pouts like a desperately spoiled child, and Crowley wishes he could go back to the beginning of Time so he would never have to hear that particular pitch in Aziraphale’s voice. "You simply can’t, Crowley.”

“I can,” Crowley squeezes his hand, “but I won’t.”

“Promise.”

A shiver cuts down his neck and sours his stomach. It takes all he has not to roll against the couch pillow and scream. 

Instead he drafts his gamiest smile and quips, “Sure.”

*

One afternoon the winds wild without warning, spitefully uprooting Crowley's most prized saplings. 

He can’t help but yell at the broken vases, anger getting the best out of him. He stomps and sneezes in the soggy mud until he can’t tell tears apart from rain. 

Blinking hurts as if it were a novelty act, but he keeps doing it until he sees it: all the dead saplings standing upright, inexplicably beaming verdant when unattached to the ground.

_Is this punishment or a parting gift?_, Crowley wonders with more curiosity than he cared to admit. Maybe it had been foolish to believe God would let him go without playing a last round of Inscrutable Poker. 

Tightening his scarf against the sleet, Crowley picks up the poor drenched plants and gently cradles them in his feverish hands.

*

His body rebels. It itches and aches, expelling all sorts of liquids a demon knew of distantly, but never sought to look up-close. 

Most hours are spent on the bathroom floor, where tiles are cool and a locked door offers safety. He doesn’t t know what he was thinking when he imagined changing would be painful without being scary. He doesn’t know what he was thinking when he believed he could keep Aziraphale clean throughout the whole mess.

The doorknob rattles again. An angel can take a door down with a flick of their wrist though most consider that too much effort, so they mind the material world like they do human souls: with hands in their pockets. 

“Anthony, will you let me in?”, the angel demands for what must amount to the thirteenth time in the last hour, which is not that unusual anymore. 

Now the name, though, that is new. Like leaving doors in their hinges and infections in his lungs. Those are new too.

Crowley never thought he’d live to see the day when Aziraphale would learn to bend to a will that was not divine. But there they were, sitting on opposite sides of a locked door, Crowley too weak to spar, his lips dry and cracked, his hair matted stiff with sweat, this changing body hellbent on humiliating him without gifting a chance of reprieve. At least falling had been quick and done with, a lighting strike. This, this _pneumonia_, was a walk to the gallows that took the scenic route.

Across the closed door, an angel sighed, shifting to press his hand against the wood. 

“Darling,” he begged, and that’s all it took for Crowley to let him in.

“Good lord, you look awful!”, he exclaims in that overenthusiastic tone of his, already rolling his shirtsleeves up. 

“Don’t!,” Crowley recoils, shoulders hitting the edge of the marble tub, and that’s not new, the panic, the electrified fear that if the angel touches him he will be scarred in some permanent way, the white in his wings withered, his face gashed with ash. 

Politely averting his eyes, the angel sits back on his heels, the neon whiteness of him illuminating the cavernous bathroom, making light of every crevice, every drool mark on the tile, the patient kindness of him grating, so impeccably postured and giving, an angel of mercy, the keeper of broken mortals. 

“Leave me alone!,” Crowley hisses. 

Flexing manicured hands on his thighs, Aziraphale shakes his head. 

“I’ll do no such thing.” 

Stubborn, stubborn to his last breath, Crowley thinks irrationally humiliated. 

Pushing down a wave of nausea, he hurls, “I’m not a tree for you to guard!”

And that may hit some mark because the angel lifts his eyes from the ground, and the haloed light around them flickers on and off, on and off, like a bulb about to burst.

“No,” he throws back without hesitation, “but if I remember correctly, _you are_ the only fruit I was forbidden to eat.” 

His voice is even, only a decibel above a whisper, and yet, like all things godly, it commands devastating gunpowder.

“Fuck,” Crowley lets out, the fight drained out him all at once. His shoulders slump forward, and Aziraphale is there, bracing to keep him from falling facedown on Victorian porcelain.

“Oh dear,” he frets. “I didn’t mean—”

“I know,” Crowley mumbles against the angel’s neck, bone-tired and lightheaded. “I know, angel. It’s fine.”

“No it’s not,” Aziraphale’s hands are unseasonably warm where they card through his tangled hair. “It was a vicious thing to say.”

“The truth is never vicious, angel. It just is.”

“For what is worth, I have since unlearned that particular—,” the angel trails off.

“Truth?”

“Ordinance.”

“Bit of unlawful trespassing am I, eh?”, Crowley teases weakly.

“You are the only holy covenant I would enter willingly," Aziraphale declares, kissing a handful of dirty hair, and the sterling conviction in his words would have been mockable if Crowley were not two breaths away from fainting.

“I am not holy, angel,” he manages to grumble against wrinkled linen.

“You are to me.” 

Tipping his head onto the crook of his arm, the angel runs a fingertip over Crowley’s blood-crusted lips until they are smooth again. The will to argue is there, still weeding through Crowley’s dehydrated brain, but instead of going on a treasure hunt, Crowley takes the angel’s thumb into his healed lips and kisses it.

“Do you still believe love is holy?”

“I believe to be blessed by love,” the angel says simply.

“Mine?”

Aziraphale makes a point of holding his gaze before saying solemnly and likely in perpetuity, the poor sod, “Ours.”

Not one to take to kindness unadvised, Crowley probes, “Divine love, you mean?”

“Oh heavens no,” Aziraphale chuckles, pulling him up by the elbows, “Human.”

*

“I used to daydream about your hair,” the angel muses wistfully as he lathers Crowley's over the marble rim. “Spent hours wondering how it would look against the white of my pillowcases, red curls spilled all over the sheets.”

“Hmm that’s rather forward of you, angel,” Crowley sighs, and he's happy now, in the lavender-scented bath, Aziraphale's voice as gentle as his fingers. He's happy in the heartbeats between pain.

“Is it?," Aziraphale sounds amused. "It certainly felt so at the time.”

“When was this?"

“Oh. A while ago.”

“I haven’t had hair that long for millennia.”

More water, the slippery spread of conditioner, more lather. 

“That long then." He tilts Crowley's head back so he can kiss the tip of his nose. "I lost track. Before England, for sure.”

It feels inordinately safe in the vault of bone-white marble, in the lukewarm estuary of illness. It feels dangerous with safety actually, with the plain water of inertia that often fells domesticated predators. It stalls the breath in his lungs, that feeling does, of the quiet before the storm. He could never quite help it, the impulse to get ahead, to hit the ground running before someone could take his feet away.

“Did you love me then?”, Crowley asks in a small, disaffected voice the angel must not care to notice, for he keeps running steady fingers up and down his scalp, breaking knots apart, breaking hearts too.

“I longed for you," he says at last. "Quite dramatically, I think.”

“Why is that?”

The angel titters fondly. 

“Oh hereditary enemies, sworn loyalties, all that cloak and dagger rigamarole. It fit right in with my grand romantic notions!” He pauses, and Crowley is sure the fever rushes back in as soon as Aziraphale lets go of him. "I rather fancied impossibles back then," the angel finally settles on. "They seemed so—” 

“—ineffable?,” Crowley sneers. 

“Quite,” the angel nods curtly, chin rigid against his chest. “But gosh, were you a vision! All willowy in black with your long red hair.” He resumes rinsing. “Yes, I longed for you then. Love came much later.”

Something like seasickness settles in Crowley’s gut. 

“Is it here now?”

“Of course, dear.”

“Is it going to leave any time soon?”

“No! Of course not.” The angel twists the red hair into a plait, wrings the water out. “Why would you ask such a thing?”

_Because I have been left before,_ Crowley thinks but doesn’t say. 

Aziraphale’s hands seize midway tucking stray hairs behind his ears, and Crowley knows he heard it even if the words weren’t spoken aloud.

Angels, by nature ethereal, should not be able to make a dent in the material world, let alone occupy any real space. And yet, Crowley could swear that the mere act of Aziraphale emotionally retreating during a conversation chilled the water off the tap and the oxygen off the air. 

“I am not God," he states, palms stilled on Crowley's shoulders. 

“No, but I’m still me,” Crowley rolls his head against the marble ledge, looking up at the dingy ceiling. He feels heavy all of a sudden, and dim. “The same I was when I fell.” 

The angel's cool hands warm up, and the fever drains away, spooked. 

“You can’t be, dearest," he admonishes kindly, turning the water off and straightening up. "No matter how much you think that, you can’t be.”

“Can’t I?”

“Change that steep is bound to leave tracks.”

“Then I wish the scars were on my cheek, not on my back.”

“And damage your beautiful countenance?”, the angel teases, reaching for a towel. 

“Would it be damage to be honest?”

There's another pause, longer, suppler, and Crowley can feel the angel retreat again, the shape of him at the head of the bathtub fade into a china-blue dimension he will never be able to reach. Crowley braces for it.

“God loves you, Crowley," the angel whispers from behind him. "Immortal or human.”

Crowley turns in the bathtub so fast water splashes all over the tile, streaking Aziraphale's mother-of-pearl vest a liquid black. 

“Tell you what," Crowley snaps. "When I die, you can keep my _fooormidable_ red hair! Not God, not the worms. _You_," he points an accusatory finger. “Just braid it and shear it off my body. When I’m dead you can keep it for me until we meet again.”

Voice choked with forced levity, Aziraphale tells his locked hands, “It will be white by then, dearest.”

Never did he look as delicate and young as he does then, kneeling on wet tile, hair grown too unruly, a child's first ringlets, nearly gold with lack of use.

He is trying, Crowley knows. He knows his angel is desperately trying to make this impulsive bargain work, to meet halfway the thing he was not made to understand: love fractured deeply by fear of refusal, a knowledge God protected him from when She prevented him from falling—from grace yes, but maybe, _just maybe_, also for Crowley. 

Somehow that thought, dreadful as it is, only spurs Crowley on. 

“So we should shear it now,” he goads, and all the light leaves the bathroom at once. They stand immersed in darkness, a painting, a tableau, an old school gymnasium with only two fencers left behind.

“Stop," the angel pleads, cupping pruned hands against his belly as if wounded. "Please just stop. You don’t have to fight me to see me love you.”

“Don’t I?! Isn’t that God’s way!?”

The light spasms in its sconce, just once, before staying firmly on.

“That’s a coward’s way, Anthony,” the angel counters, quiet with power, a power Crowley is only indirectly familiar with, love and compassion, as irresistible as it is foreign to someone who spent the last six millennia fearing a basement stinking of mildew and rotten hope. 

Powerless himself, he leans into it, resentment and pain dissipating against the force of Aziraphale’s rounded shoulders, the penitent arch of his empty hands, his mouth barely within reach, righteous and so impossibly human in its helplessness Crowley jerks forward to press their lips together, quick with worry and meek with love.

“You’re right, you’re right,” he breathes into the space between their foreheads. “I am so sorry, angel,” kissing the high of his cheek, the corner of his mouth, knocking their teeth together with too much urgency, sloshing water off the tub as he clasps the angel’s skull and mutters into his ear, “Of course you’re right. Please forgive me. I am filled with grief.”

“No," the angel pulls away. Covering both of Crowley’s hands with his, he smiles. "You are filled with love. You just don’t know what to do with it.” 

Standing, he tugs at Crowley’s wrists, “Now get up and let me towel you off.”

It is a strange occurrence to be acquainted with shame when sin was at the origin of your remaking, but there he stands, in cold bathwater, feeling nakedness like a second skin, sensitive and unpleasantly imposed. The angel’s hands go merrily chasing moisture with a tarry cloth, and every angle, bony and sparsely covered with hair, feels tender to the touch. Old chromatophores flare up, spreading like brush fire across his chest and groin, arousal thickening between his legs in what must seem a vulgar lack of motor control, inappropriately out of place amidst such a mundane act of care, because angels are caretakers by nature you see, and he, he was made to be mindful and caring too, once, but then there were questions about dark matter and black holes that spread for miles and miles and and— 

“Angel—” he warns with a whisper, closing his eyes, thighs shaking, neck going heavy in tempo with the strokes, because yes, it must be deliberate, now he sees, feels, the angel is being mindful too, pulling softly at his cock, taking care not to cause hurtful friction, the coolness of his hands radiating through the rough cloth, his face blushed, Crowley can see him now, gazing up with a quirk in his lips, not quite a smile, too smug, too shallow, a bit of performance theatre Crowley gathers, for Aziraphale too fears being rebuffed.

(_Oh. Did I do that to him? Did I teach an angel to distrust love?_)

He closes his eyes again, head lolling back against tile, knees about to buckle, thoughts growing stringy, disassembled by Aziraphale’s breath rabbiting against his hip.

Always the one demanding, nothing prepared Crowley for offerings. Reciprocation scares him. God had never loved him back, and She made him; how could he expect an angel to want him without falling? 

_(But I love him, so very much. Maybe I can love enough for both of us. Maybe he is safe if I'm the one carrying all the love.) _

He lets his body feel.

The towel is still between them when he pushes against it, against Aziraphale’s hand underneath, stuttering nervous and fast, no cadence but that of sound, their sound, he realizes drunkly, they are both panting rather loud, and there’s an angel kneeling at his feet and looking up at him with love, love that shouldn’t be there, love that could kill him, if Heaven finds out and _they will_, they will come and take him away so it’s better if they don’t do this—they haven’t since that first time, and already then it had been too much, God must have tasted it, snatched the stench of them together off the night air and scowled!— a once-demon, no, _a quasi-mortal bedding a Principality!_—oh, he had tried so hard to be—what? good? Caring. For Aziraphale. Keeping him safe by keeping his hands to himself, enough bristle to be unlovable, always one inch away, one step ahead, but now—

“Don’t stop,” Crowley rasps only to find himself plucked off his feet and unceremoniously dropped on white silk sheets he knows were tartan flannel that morning, hair spilling over frilly pillowcases, three feet of iron-pressed ringlets cascading down his arms, technicolor red and magically dry, an angel crouched between his legs, nose buried in his pubic bone, the bed rattling faintly under a want that is not human, nor ethereal, nor will it go quietly into the night. 

For a moment there’s panic, a primal sort of panic that a creature like Aziraphale can kill him, can damage a mortal body quite irreparably if he sets his mind to it. But then again he always could, couldn’t he? He just chose not to. Just like you did. That was the true Arrangement between the two of you: to keep each other safe by keeping love at bay. 

Ultimately the angel does upend Crowley, not by socking the heart out of his chest, but by closing his mouth around his cock and sucking. 

Pleasure, Crowley remembers, came only intermittently, in the rare moments he let himself run a hand over golden hay, grown wild in the American Midwest, the heat rising up from the earth and straight into his palm. That’s how it feels, he thinks, to be inside Aziraphale, to have an angel put his mouth on you and draw you in until the mass of atoms that comprises you becomes his, like overripe hay, breakable and bendable to his whims, fingers tongue lips slicking skin and muscle, milking hardness and bonelessness and the other thing that feels like cotton-wrapped summer, pink-dusted hilltops and melting ice on the pavement, warmth and dampness and the loose lightness of existing outside duty and discipline. 

_I am safe now,_ Crowley realizes distantly, trying and failing to catch his breath as the angel catches his eye over ruffled pubic hair and smiles, his mouth stretched thin and shiny and proud, smiting even, downright breathtaking in its wetness, and Crowley wants to thank him and apologize for the careless thrashing of his hips and the half-moons on his shoulders, wants to tell him that on the retro-verso of his skin it feels like a train station looks at dawn, right before daybreak, which he only knows because for the last two centuries seeing the trains tear through the dark tracks, the little yellow windows like stars against the night sky, was as close as he ever got to go back home. Until now. Until now, on his back with an angel licking him open, it was the desert, monochromatic graveyards and electric hums without being attached to any power source. It was a sleepy sort of death, this room with green stars glued to the ceiling, reachable, flat and untrue, until now. 

He cracks his mouth to say all, or some, or a modicum of this, of these explosive fireworks of thankfulness and devotion, but him being him, fails short and ripcords instead, “Marry me.” 

A slight alteration in suction may have been enough to signal he had been heard, that the angel had registered the enormity of his ill-measured words, but Crowley is coming before he can look, his body an enemy even when it seemed tamed, and after that the angel is at his neck, suddenly undressed, suddenly smoldering like only Venus or Mercury ever dared to, too hot to touch, too bright for the naked eye, but what can Crowley do but wrap his arms around the burning heavenly heft of him and bring it down to the planes of his chest until their noses rub together and they are kissing, hard and slippery, raw with unending hunger, his cock growing taut and full again under the weight of an angel’s leaky heat, and he can sense Aziraphale's grin, the sharp edges of it brushing against his jaw prior to a plump hand snaking between their bellies and holding them both together in a tight fist, a warrior wielding a bifid sword.

Mortified, Crowley rises up on his elbows, sweat pooling behind his knees.

“Did you do _that_?!”

And Aziraphale chuckles like a good sport and shakes his crown of golden curls.

“This isn’t magic, dear. This is your body being fed for once in its life.”

As to underscore the obviousness of his point, he tugs at their cocks until they uncoil together, a thing of beauty, Crowley thinks falling back into the bridal-white pillows. No wonder God did everything in pairs, killed and punished and preserved every living thing in pairs. Symmetry looked exquisite. 

Crowley can’t help recalling the crushed saplings bulging back to life on his palm, alive and erect again just because he wanted them to. 

_Still testing me, aren't you, God? _

A disquieting thought made the more unwieldy by Aziraphale, Aziraphale who always made things harder, lovelier, clearer. Aziraphale’s watercolor hands, a caregiver’s hands, on the outside of his hips, canting them up, his fingers on his hair, swiping it off Crowley’s face so he could kiss the damp hairline and sigh, “I do love you so,” which is grammatically compact but emotionally gigantic, Crowley feeling immediately smothered by its colossus. 

Straddling him in slow-motion, the angel begins to press into him until Crowley jerks away. Like a socket in the wall, factory settings, built-in infrastructure, they are there: the things they told you when you got off the beaten path, the things that kept you from ever finding your way back in the dark.

(_You held the semblance of goodness once, but inside you were rotten from conception. Damnation is not your punishment. It’s your reward._) 

It is a terrible thing to be loved when you've never learnt to love yourself.

With featherlight lips, Aziraphale traces the bridge of Crowley's nose, the arch of his eyebrows. 

“A heart can always fix itself,” he murmurs, prescient always, of course always, an angel. “But how much easier it is to do it with love.” 

(Another small miracle, not in size but in effort: the way someone trusts you to love without breaking, when all you ever did was help things fall apart).

The angel bears down on his lap and the world fogs over. 

(Gospel according to Hell: _Sin lives in pain and thrives in isolation. You are sin and you are pain, nothing less and nothing more._) 

“Wait!” Crowley stills him by the hips. “I don’t want to hurt you.”

Aziraphale laughs, a bellyful, nearly insulting in his amused bafflement.

“How could _you_ hurt me? I am an _angel_ !” 

“They might see,” Crowley points heavenwards.

“Who?”

“Other angels.” Crowley frowns at Aziraphale’s expanding smile. “God?”

“So? What are they going to do about it? Reprimand me for consorting with a mortal?”

“Well,” Crowley points down between them. “I am not exactly _that_ either. Not yet anyway.” 

The angel brushes a hand over Crowley’s lower abdomen and black-blue scales chime like running water against the grain of his knuckles.

“No, you are something else altogether, aren’t you, my dear?,” he says contemplative. “God must have been distracted not to have seen it before.”

“Perhaps She did,” Crowley swallows, and the universe contracts into a hunk of smoke, huddling in the tarry underbrush. “Perhaps that’s why She threw me away.”

The angel smiles again, brittle and dry, and Crowley wants to read him like people read books and tea leafs and constellations, how they find ways to put into words the fear they have of taking wrong turns and not being able to turn back around. 

“If that’s the case," Aziraphale says, "then how lucky that you are out of Her care and under mine, because—,” he eases into Crowley's body, and this time they both shudder, Aziraphale dumbstruck for once, eyes fluttering shut as he fumbles forward and erases all space between them, skin to skin, forehead to tail bone. “Because,” he struggles against Crowley’s lips, “I will never be able to let you go.” 

It feels like falling, cliche as it might be, at first it feels like falling into a pool of black water, serene and weightless, arms fanned over his head, open, opening further, flowers streaming out of his chest, big blue hydrangeas slithering from between his legs, twining with his cock, the purple veins turned into saplings, pulling the blood out of his body and into Aziraphale’s, taking root there, deep and dark in the mulch of him, crawling up to his lungs, laying spores, growing new buds until both of them are interlinked like tree trunks and climbing vines, communicating leaf to leaf, a floral mouth to mouth. 

“Dear lord above I want you,” Crowley wails, breathless. “I want you so much I would flay myself alive just to keep you inside me.”

The angel leans back, white wings draped over Crowley’s vaulted knees, sacrum digging on Crowley’s thighs. “Rather dramatic, my dear.”

“Still true.”

“Completely unnecessary,” he tuts, linking their hands together over the pillows, the white looking bloody against Crowley’s Pre-Raphaelite hair. “I like your skin right where it is.”

“Angel…,” and there’s shame now, clumsy and unadorned. “I don’t think I will be able to change anymore. I mean—illness and old age might be all that I’m allowed now—”

“Constancy is a thing of beauty, dear,” the angel interrupts, rocking up and back, down and forward, and the universe swings with him, the axis of the Earth serviced by the sway of his hips.

“Sure sure,” Crowley barrels through dazedly, “in marble statues and rocky mountains maybe. But angel I’m this—_shape_—and—well—might be the only shape I can offer you—“

“It is all I could ever want,” the angel exhales into his mouth, borrowed breath whooshing out of Crowley’s nose, sharp with the purifying stench of chlorine, and so it goes, the last remnant of infection, purged from his lungs. 

“That’s not necessarily true,” he drills on. 

“It’s not a lie either,” the angel shrugs, taking him in hand, inky scales shimmering against the ruddiness of his fist. “I have wanted you for a very long time, my dear. I have cared about you for longer still. You are not a shape. You are the Firmament.”

“God’s in-between?,” Crowley manages to punch out between strokes. Stars, like needles pricked in the tissue of the night sky, manifest behind his curtained eyelids. 

“With all the bright light and black holes and shifting particles it may contain,” Aziraphale says, ghosting a kiss to his shoulder. “You are a transfusing whole, Crowley. Always were, always will be.”

“Angel,” and it’s close, oblivion is, and a Principality, magical and winged, sheathed inside him, made safe by spangled bony plates and delicate blood vessels, freckles turned into nautical charts so they can sail together into Asphodel Meadows where no one will ever find them, where no one will ever dare to own them again. “Angel, will you love me when gravity has its way with me?”

“Oh dearest,” the peal of Aziraphale’s orgasm mingles with the sizzling of inhuman semen dripping glossy against the granular scutes on Crowley’s inner thighs. “Judging by the state you were in, I believe it already did.”

* 

There’s also a mild pollen allergy and a broken wrist one Christmas. 

But after that, not a single cut or nosebleed or headache. Anthony J. Crowley sails through unscathed for what seems a rather long time, though upon checking the calendar hanging on the bookstore wall, it had not even been a year.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I didn't mean to go so hard but then my mind cracked open and spilled all over this chapter. Enjoy (?)!


End file.
